Beyond responsive

Yes, we need to go deeper

July 31, 2014Igor Barbashin

Responsive layout is great but it’s not a silver bullet

A new era is coming. You can feel it if you just look around. Every single person that spends money has a smartphone. Most of them don’t use computers. Because why bother? They have everything on their phones. More than that, people stop buying computers because they are happy with a phone or a tablet.

The new era is a post-pc era. Everything goes mobile.

Websites evolve as well

What was common before is not trendy anymore. A separate mobile version stopped making sense when people started to use multiple devices. There is a great chance of seeing improper version of a website on your device if companies don’t keep up with technologies and trends. To a great extend, responsive websites help to solve this issue and make lives of both developers and customers easier now.

But, what’s wrong with responsive?

Responsive approach itself works. It’s just template solutions are not yet perfect.
This concept assumes you’re using the same assets and codebase on a mobile device as you use on desktop. Which at some point makes sense, but it’s very easy to cross the line where the mobile experience goes from acceptable to annoying.

Using mobile means to use unstable internet connection. And most of the page reloads take a big chunk of time. Each page takes about a megabyte of traffic. It also takes time to render the page with styles and initialize all scripts. In an online store you’ll navigate through 3-5 times more pages than on a regular website.

SPA is the solution

SPA stands for Single Page Application. In a nutshell this approach allows to build mobile-first websites. They load once and then communicate with the server with only small bits information and reload only a part of the pages.

A lot of companies have started to leverage this approach. The most robust framework for building these type of websites is AngularJS, maintained by Google. One of examples of good e-commerce projects built on AngularJS is the CouchCommerce. It’s a great platform that builds in into existing stores built on Magento and other open-source engines. This is the best solution for companies that already have a working online store but don’t have a budget to rewrite it into a single page application.

Here at Fancy Colors, we have switched to a single page web application approach for online stores, specifically for jewellery stores. So far, this is a best solution that benefits both the desktop and mobile experience. Our design is consistent, responsive, user-friendly and highly optimized for mobile devices.